You accepted the friend request from this weirdo just because you knew him. But now he is updating his status every now and then and you are thinking if you can shut him up without removing or blocking him from your friend list. If you find yourself in a similar situation, here’s the ultimate guide.
The easiest way to block a person, application or a page from appearing in your Facebook ‘News Feed’ is to press the ‘X’ icon that appears on the right side of an update.
Once you do that, a dialog will appear. It will have three options; Remove this update, Remove all by ABC and Report post/Spam. All of these options will remove that particular update from your news feed. If you decide to remove that particular update only, by selecting Remove this update, future updates from that person will continue to appear in your Facebook homepage. If this is something that you don’t want, you should select Remove all by ABC. But if you think your friend is directing you towards spam via his update, you should select the third option. The best thing about this process is that the person whose updates you’ve blocked, will not be told about this.
To know about the people/applications you’ve removed from appearing in your news feed, click on the arrow pointing downwards, placed next to the ‘Most Recent’ link. Clicking on that should open a drop-down menu, similar to what is shown in the image below.
Click for full-sized image.
From here, click on ‘Edit Options’. This should open a dialog like the one shown in the image, below.
This dialog is a record of all that you’ve removed from your wall. If you notice that the weirdo friend of yours has turned into a quiet and decent person, you can remove his name from the list by pressing the blue ‘X’ button along with his name. Same is the case with applications and pages. Previously we thought this dialog showed the names of those people who had posted recently, this is not the case. This is a tool by which your ‘blocked’ list can be managed. We apologize for any inconvenience that we might have caused.
Update: Facebook now allows you to ‘unsubscribe’ from people. Once you are unsubscribed, you will not receive any updates from that particular person. The button appears on the top right of a person’s profile as shown in the image below.
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We, Shahan (left) and Farhan (right), are students, tech junkies, gaming enthusiasts and teenage bloggers from Pakistan.